Arcadia Italy

Students studying with us at Roma Tre and will be seeing some strange activity on campus this week: they might hear and see students and their families milling about outside crowded classrooms, hear applause coming from those classrooms or see the occasional student run out in tears. Of joy or desperation. Just next door to our center, in the Bookstore Bistrot Le Storie, many students have been toasting with friends and family, some donning a laurel wreath around their head. These are the students who are defending their theses and, upon completion, graduating from university.

In a European university, students present all of their final exams orally; dissertations are generally defended in late February/March for Spring candidates and in October for Fall candidates. There is no one day that these take place, as the date is set specifically for each student, depending on his advisor and department.

During exams, students present the material they’ve reviewed during a long reading period to a panel of 3-6 professors in front of their peers. Generally the panel will ask a few questions and the student will be expected to expound on a single theme for several minutes. They may interrupt to ask for further clarification or more questions. Usually the entire exam lasts about 15-20 minutes while other students wait their turn. The panel will award a number grade out of 30 which will be written on the student’s libretto degli esami (similar to our transcript, except it’s all done at the time of the exam and recorded on the student’s record right there in front of everyone).

The same theory applies for students defending their theses. The students who are graduating will have written and bound a dissertation. Their theses present original research and they work on them for many months (or even years, at times) with one advising professor from their department. They then present the dissertation, in writing, to their professor and orally to a panel of professors who will provide the final grade. This is the Laurea. Some friends and family attend the dissertation and will hear the panel when they award the final grade. It is then when you’ll hear the explosion of applause (or see the occasional tear) and witness afterwards some of the reverie depicted here.

Typically, the students will pile into a local café and celebrate with family and friends nearby. There may be a larger dinner later on or not.

If you sit in one of the libraries on campus or in the study areas, you’ll soak in all this atmosphere and observe the stark differences between our US graduation ceremonies and the very low key and almost strictly academic nature of the Laurea. All laureati will convene at a University convocation each year but it still bears little resemblance to the more Anglo-Saxon graduation traditions adopted in the US.